ZERO DARK THIRTY

ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

Grade: B

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong and James Gandolfini

Premise: A CIA Intelligence Agent spends years researching the movements and possible whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

Rated R for language, intense, bloody violent content, a scene of torture, and brief nudity

            Every year, I see movies that are adored by critics and showered with awards and voting committees’ year-end honors, yet, when I see them, the main thing I think is “solid, but unspectacular”. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, already an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay, joins that group. Obviously, it’s above reproach as a crafted piece of work, it tells an interesting true story that everyone over a certain age knows at least a little bit about, and ends with a riveting half hour sequence that, while fictionalized, you’d swear was real. However, lacking a really engaging narrative core is a problem for a movie that exceeds two and a half hours and contains very little humor and even less actual character development. I knew what it was about coming in-like I did with Lincoln-so I expected this no-frills sort of moviemaking, but I left disappointed that I wasn’t really captured.

Plot: After 9/11, one man became the most sought/wanted person in the world. I’m sure you know who I’m talking about. Scores of people in multiple government agencies were set the task of finding him, be it through satellite photos, intelligence files or interrogations of rumored subordinates. One such person, Zero Dark Thirty invites us to believe, was Maya (Jessica Chastain), a fictional person but one who nonetheless embodies the determination, stress and strain of the many faceless people who looked for Osama Bin Laden for nearly a decade, often doing so while the average person believed the man was dead. A straight-laced, no-distractions workhorse, Maya is sent to Kuwait to help oversee the interrogation of men with ties to Al Qaeda. She’s at first alarmed by the brutal tactics employed by Dan (Jason Clarke), the local anti-terrorist specialist, but she begins to pick up on the trade, questioning handcuffed men and even bribing or lying to them to get them to tell her what she wants. Against the advice of her colleagues and superiors (Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle), she single-mindedly pursues an Al Ahmed, believed to be one of “the next three” in Al Qaeda’s pyramid of power, after bin Laden. When an important contact springs a trap that kills one of Maya’s best friends in the field, she considers giving up, but when al Ahmed resurfaces, she chases him. With the help of more tech-savvy colleagues and some locals who know the local area and language, she’s able to track him to a large statehouse in Pakistan, one with iron gates, a sixteen-foot protective wall, and every protection it can be afforded. And satellite surveillance begins to suggest someone else may be living there, as well as al Ahmed. Believing it’s Osama bin Laden, Maya and her department scramble to gather enough intel to convince their superiors to move on it.

What Works?

Like director Kathryn Bigelow’s last film, 2009’s Best Picture The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty is a deglamorized, gritty film, one that sneers at suggestions of romance or sentiment and prefers to arrange dynamite suspense sequences. In this regard, it succeeds admirably. It’s impressive that a movie that uses a lot of technical jargon and a lot of confusing Arab names can, at times, captivate so easily. There are some great suspense sequences, including a depiction of a night-time Navy Seal raid that can rival anything in March’s Act of Valor; even though we know what’s going to happen, we’re still unsure.

For leading lady Jessica Chastain, her role as Maya caps a mesmerizing two-year stretch in which she’s appeared in some 12 movies and become an A-list star. For this film, she’s received her second Academy Award nomination, and, while I won’t say she doesn’t deserve it, I just have to say…Maya is kind of a colorless role. Chastain gets to shed a few tears at one point and gets to yell and cuss at another, but she’s not an action heroine, she’s not a soldier, not a politician, not a speech-maker, and we know nothing about her. She’s not given a family, a love interest, a backstory, or any facts other than she wants to find Bin Laden so badly she spends almost ten years looking for him. It’s an interesting role (and a rather curious choice for such talented, expressive actress), but not amazing. It doesn’t help Chastain’s case that most of the other major players in the cast are expressive actors, too. Clarke rivets as a torture expert, the always great Mark Strong pitches a few fits as a hotheaded CIA bigwig, and Jennifer Ehle brings spunk and energy to her role as an intel colleague, and all liven up the scenery more than Chastain.

What Doesn’t Work?

While it’s a masterpiece of editing and cinematography and suspense, Zero Dark Thirty is, like its leading lady, kind of colorless as a whole. There’s no character development at all; just forward progress in the story. And even the Navy Seal sequence feels like it’s from a different film. Ditto for the opening, a prologue composed of real-life 9-11 phone calls from people in air traffic control towers and the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks; such an intense, emotional beginning seems to call for a movie that isn’t so brisk and business-like. Unlike, say, Lincoln—another highly-touted monolith of a movie that underwhelmed me recently; one that poured on the sentiment—Zero Dark Thirty positively flees the idea of sentiment so that the viewer walks out after 2.5 hours and goes “…okay, well that was cool” and goes on about their day. Pretty much what I did.

Content: Dark Thirty has made a lot of headlines for its alleged claim that the torture of Arabs led to key facts that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Politicians have been outraged by this idea, which is personified in a few scenes of Clarke’s method man waterboarding and taunting a feeble, bruised prisoner, then putting a dog collar on him and stuffing him in a box. They’re intense scenes, to be sure, but I wasn’t appalled (I’ve seen at least two other movies—The Expendables and Safe House—where people were waterboarded; I was expected something bloodier). Anyways, other than those scenes, which take place early on, Zero’s R rating comes courtesy of a sprinkling of F and MF words and the pools of blood spilling from people shot by Navy Seals.

Bottom Line: It’s an interesting film (if you’ve been DYING to know just how Seal Team Six killed Bin Laden, hurry and see this movie), but Zero Dark Thirty is a lot like a lot of other Oscar-bait-type thrillers: it’s too busy and smart and important to be really accessible to the viewer. And that’s a problem.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Screenplay by Mark Boal

Rated R

Length: 157 minutes